


Palm Tree

by DiurnalDays



Series: Stars in the Night Sky [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: College, Dreams vs. Reality, Dreamsharing, Fantasy, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Speculative fiction, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:36:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28597074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiurnalDays/pseuds/DiurnalDays
Summary: “Yo! I’m Wei, but you can call me Will!” the guy said.“You’re the guy who almost bashed my brains out with a baseball bat last night,” Cecil realized.
Series: Stars in the Night Sky [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095470
Kudos: 1





	Palm Tree

A cool autumn breeze wafted through the dorm room, yanking papers out of an unzipped backpack and scattering them across the floor. When Cecil rose from their chair to close the window, a face pressed against the glass was staring back at them. There was a guy crouching on the windowsill outside.

“Yo! I’m Wei, but you can call me Will!” the guy said. 

“You’re the guy who almost bashed my brains out with a baseball bat last night,” Cecil realized. 

“That’s me!” Will said, smiling brightly. Even though his outfit of a winter coat and jeans was almost mind-numbingly plain at this time of year, his face was very recognizably pudgy.

Cecil narrowed their eyes. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t push you off the ledge right now. One, two, three...” 

“Wait wait wait wait wait!” Will cried, waving his hands around frantically. “I’m not gonna do anything! I just wanna ask you a question!”

“This better not be a trick,” Cecil replied. “Ask away.”

“Jeez, you think that little of me?” Will sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “I was gonna ask if you could come with me and tell me what the heck is going on in Hartley Commons.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that you’re not actually planning on dragging me into a dark alleyway and finishing last night’s job?” Cecil crossed their arms. “Fat chance.” 

Will’s shoulders sagged. “Alright, I get that we kinda got off on the wrong foot yesterday. Sorry about that. I thought you were the weird guy who’s been chasing me everywhere. I only realized you weren’t him when you started punching me instead of running away. Sorry again.” 

Cecil wasn’t sure if they really bought Will’s apology, even though a weird apology was better than no apology at all. They tapped their finger against their chin, considering their options. 

Behind them, Kailani opened the dorm room door and dropped her swim meet duffel bag on the bed. If she was perturbed by a stranger crouching on the windowsill, she didn’t show it. 

“Who’s this guy?” Kailani asked, stretching her arms back and forth. 

“I’m her friend!” Will said. 

“ _ Their _ ,” Cecil hissed. “And I’m not friends with him.”

“Alright, I’m  _ their _ friend!” Will corrected. “We were just about to head over to Hartley Commons!”

“No we weren’t,” Cecil protested, but Kailani was already nodding along with a smile on her face. 

“Hartley Commons? The one with the great breakfast bagel bakery?” Kailani said. “You guys mind if I tag along?”

At that point, Cecil knew that there was no way they would finish studying tonight. Hanging out around campus with Kailani inevitably meant endless detours and conversation late into the night. At least the odds of winning a second confrontation against Will were now stacked in Cecil’s favor. 

Surprisingly, Will did not pull Cecil into a dark alleyway on the way to Hartley Commons despite ample opportunities to do so. He didn’t take a single step off of the well-lit main road all the way there. His good behavior was very, very strange, but Cecil wasn’t complaining about it. They’d already had a month’s worth of physical confrontations happen just over the past few days.

Once they reached the front courtyard of Hartley Commons, Kailani unlocked the main door with her student ID keycard. As soon as the keycard reader flashed green, the door lock audibly popped open. 

Hartley Commons was a large airy building with tall glass walls and rows of offices, classrooms, common areas, and dining halls lining its interior. Will stopped in an indoor garden area close to the center of the building where carefully manicured tropical plants reached up toward a high glass ceiling.

“See this giant palm tree?” Will said, gesturing at a palm tree that rose a hundred feet into the air in the very center of the garden. A string of festive Christmas lights was wrapped around its trunk. “This wasn’t here a week ago! Where’d it come from?”

“You interrupted my studying so that you could ask me about a palm tree,” Cecil said incredulously. Kailani yawned and checked her phone. 

“Hey, questions about palm trees are pretty important too!” Will protested. “And since you saw me last night, you must be just like me, so I thought you might have an answer to this!”

Those last words gave Cecil pause. Although they hadn’t had a good look at Will’s features the previous night, they knew that Will was just like them and Kailani -- someone who could use the powers of the apparitions that wandered the campus grounds at night. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to see each other in their dreams. That meant that Cecil could actually give him a straightforward answer.

“Will.” Cecil gave him the most serious expression they could muster. “You’ll be the first person to hear this story.”

“Really?” Will’s eyes were practically sparkling.

That was actually a slight exaggeration, as Cecil had told this story to Thomas when he had come over to help Kailani with a group project. But they weren’t about to tell Will any of that.

“You see, we are just like you,” Cecil began. “While you have super strength, I can control starlight, while Kailani can control water and tropical life.”

Kailani nodded in confirmation. Will now looked at them both with an almost childlike expression of awe on his face. 

“We first discovered that she had these powers just a few months ago,” Cecil continued. “When she was asleep, her powers went haywire, and she created a tropical world inside of the Commons just like the island she grew up on. There were sand beaches, flowering plants, even strips of ocean.”

“Wow,” Will said, glancing around the garden slack-jawed as if he could imagine that dream tropical world filling the garden around them.

“But the thing was, we couldn’t let that dream become reality. If it did, then that would damage the barrier between the dream world and the real one. That meant that I had to work together with someone else to defeat Kailani and bring her dream to an end. This palm tree is the one thing that still remains from that dream.”

“I can confirm that everything Cecil just said is true,” Kailani said, nodding emphatically. 

Well, Cecil wasn’t entirely sure if the order of events really went like that, seeing as they’d lost most of their memories of the incident after waking up. Kailani remembered even less of the incident, as she had been completely unconscious for the entirety of it, so the only version of the story that still existed was Cecil’s incomplete recollection of it. Even though Kailani trusted Cecil’s judgement enough to believe in their version of the story, it wasn’t necessarily a true story.

But Will was nodding along with a satisfied smile on his face, so Cecil would let him wholeheartedly believe in that half-true story. 

That night, there was no dramatic second confrontation between Cecil and Will. In fact, after sending Will back to his freshman dorm on the other side of campus, Cecil returned to their dorm room with Kailani with enough time to spare for their homework. While they still wondered about the identity of the mysterious man that Will had mistaken them for, the answer to that question wouldn’t be answered that night. 

But there would still be many more encounters with Will for Cecil to look forward to in the future. There was no way that a guy could crawl onto a stranger’s windowsill and then believe everything that came out of their mouth without being stupid, overly earnest, or both. That observation about Will was now what the palm tree symbolized to Cecil whenever they walked past the garden in Hartley Commons.


End file.
